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RICHMOND, Va. — Change matters. It really does. Just ask the hundreds of Virginia Baptist students who dropped the change in their pockets into 5-gallon water containers during student events this year and collectively raised $7,660.21 to support ‘clean water’ initiatives.
Students attending regional YEC’s, Impact Virginia!, junior and senior high weekends, MC2 and worship arts camp were challenged to get involved as they viewed a video and learned some sobering statistics. Like the average person in the U.S. uses 80-100 gallons of water every day, yet more than 2 billion people have no access to clean water. Every 15 seconds a child dies from a water-related disease; and even in our nation, thousands of families are without indoor plumbing.
“Change Matters,” a cooperative initiative of the World Hunger Fund and the Virginia Baptist Mission Board, provided an opportunity for students to make a difference–not only by giving but getting involved.
A portion of the offering will cover the digging of a well in South Africa. In April a student team from Bonsack Baptist Church in Roanoke will travel to that country to be on hand to help dig the well and hopefully see the first water produced.
And in 2010 a portion of the “Change Matters” offering will be used in Southwest Virginia to provide indoor bathroom facilities to several families.
This initiative was a collaborative effort by the emerging leaders, courageous churches and glocal missions teams at the VBMB. To show messengers at the annual meeting of the BGAV how the change of students mattered, several containers of the coins donated by Virginia students were on display.